The “jobs” issue: Obama didn’t cause it in three years and Romney can’t fix it in four years.

Barnstable County’s unemployment rate last January was reported at 10.6 percent, better than Nantucket’s (11.8) and 14.5 percent on Martha’s Vineyard. As recently as April, the Massachusetts jobless rate was 6.3 percent, besting the national figure of 8.2 percent reported in May.

During those five months, Mexico’s unemployment rate hovered fairly steady at 5 percent. There are some seemingly logical guesses despite myriad variables why a less affluent, less educated country like Mexico seems to have fewer jobless people and why, comparatively, “jobs” is being painted as the leading issue in the U.S. and Mexican presidential elections (last Sunday in Mexico) along with “jobs” supposedly being the answer to flailing economies.

Consider, please, the minimum wage of $8 per hour in Massachusetts and compare it to the less than $13.50 per day earned by 57 percent of Mexicans.

The jobless rate is defined as the number of people who have recently lost a job plus people actively looking for a job as a percentage of the labor force. Underscore “actively looking” for a job. Those who aren’t looking are not counted.

Let’s compare two road jobs: During construction last year of a major overpass several miles long over the city of Playa del Carmen on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, one could see an extraordinary number of workmen with hand tools doing what one might think would be impossible feats with concrete and steel members of the overpass. Now and then, a crane would appear to lift the largest and heaviest structural members of the overpass while a platoon of workmen waited below armed with hammers, shovels, axes and pry bars for it to drop into place.

Quite the opposite on a recent road excavation and pipe-laying project in the Sea Street, Hyannis area where you saw a few people working and more big machinery doing the jobs of many men. So despite the eruption of fault-finding between the major U.S. political parties in this election year, the public cannot overlook the probability that machinery and technology have taken more jobs than they have replaced. That was not supposed to happen. It’s another case of unintended consequences.

Simple first-generation robotic tools – fixed factory machines - were developed during the Industrial Revolution and were capable of manufacturing tasks that allowed production without the need for human hands. Now, digitally controlled industrial robots using artificial intelligence have been built – but kept in check - since the 1960s to avoid massive unemployment.

That was when, ironically, a story surfaced that Japan had developed an automobile manufacturing plant with robots capable of producing cars with but a few people checking on the robots. The idea was scratched, went the story, because too many workers would become unemployed and, without a paycheck, who would buy the cars? Henry Ford ran into that problem with his pioneering production line and had to pay his workers more money so they could buy the cars they were producing.

In the early cotton mill days of Fall River, Lowell and New Bedford, immigrants ran the spinning machines of the wealthy predators who paid them a wage. Then, as owners also of the nearby tenement housing and grocery stores, they got much of it back by renting and selling to their own employees. The industry first moved south in the 1940s and 50s, then overseas in search of cheap labor. That’s another answer to where the jobs have gone.

Barnstable has cut a number of jobs in many of its myriad departments since the recession awoke the sleeping giant but if you would care to take a note, it hasn’t slowed increases in town fees and property taxes gauged by what a family actually pays four times a year instead of once to reduce the pain. Instead, the public service workforce – particularly the executive level - that remains continues to collect ever more in wages. So that’s another reason why there aren’t enough jobs for everybody.

Look at the case of a Cape big-box store with a busy deli counter and notice how employees there come and go at a rather rapid rate, then wonder if it is true that there are some tough jobs American labor won’t do. That also contributes for the high jobless rate.

It’s no secret that economic and wage progress has excluded much of the Middle Class. Without that formerly huge and vibrant sector of the economy flush with good wages, fewer products can be purchased and consequently, production slows and more people lose employment.

Barnstable is part and parcel of all this. The more real estate and other taxes increase, the more fees for this or that service inch upwards, the less spendable income the Middle Class has to spur the local economy by eating out more often, buying a new car, stove, refrigerator or shoes.